Do hackers ever stop here?

Ok, I guess I got hacked somehow. Was playing the game a few hours ago, got disconnected in the middle of a mission and couldn't reconnect. It happens frequently. Went for dinner, came back, logged in. Instead of coming up on the character I was playing, the selection came up on my main character, who was not in Kamadan where I ALWAYS leave it, but in great temple of baltazar. Huh? Everything looked ok, but I realized after a second look that the zkeys I had on my character, maybe 40 or 50 of em, were gone and a mini whiptail devourer was there in their place.

I'm not QQing because I got hacked, although I've done absolutely NOTHING to get hacked. Never bought anything with real money, never even visited those sites, don't give my account info to anyone including the people I live with, don't play on any other computers except my own etc. I guess I've had the same password forever instead of changing it, which is bad, although that's all I could think of.

It could be worse - none of my characters were deleted, especially my main (who finally has GWAMM) They all still had their armor, including fow. None of my main's weapons was gone (although they were all customized, even the tormented ones) Nothing else appeared to be missing, so I think I may have interrupted the person. Not that I had a lot else at the moment, only maybe 50k in my xunlai plus a bunch of booze and some items I was gonna sell. So I immediately opened a ticket with support (not that I'll get anything back, but I want that thief banned) changed my gw password and my plaync password. As I type this I'm running every virus/spyware/malware scan I have, which is quite a few tho I dunno how something could get past my firewall (comodo). So now I'm worried that the hacker will somehow get back into my account and delete my char. Anything else, even losing my armor and stuff, I could live with, but seeing the work I put into my main gone would probably make me quit gw.

Do hackers ever stop at that? I mean, I dunno how they'd get back into my account but is it possible they'd just take my zkeys and not delete my toon or salvage my fow? And literally, all I could find missing was the zkeys. They didn't take anything out of my storage, including the 50k or 9 ecto I had, and nothing was missing off any of my other characters. Did I just get really lucky?

this happened to my cousin a few years back but his chars were deleted. You got off lucky.

My suggestion is to change you password IMMEDIATELY! as you never know when the hacker may decide to be really maliciuos and delete all of your chars.

also do you know anyone who knows your account name/password? check with them to see if they had anything to do with it.

Like the guy above, change your pass ASAP. With a firewall and since you sound like a smart player, I don't know how it could've happened.

Sounds like a brute-force macro style though, because it seems to have targetted specifics like the zkeys. Makes sense because of their popular usage now.

50 zkeys is bad, but considering had you been hacked by a actual person you prolly would have lost much more, its not that bad.

Side Note: Paranoia of this is part of why I don't have my ign displayed on guru. Other games have more safeguards and locking mechanisms aswell.

It's probably where the scam sites even those things they offer to "trade" in the first place :P

Which reminds me. Anyone else get a scam pm?

The EXACT SAME type of thing happened to me today, this is very suspicious

Everything was fine yesterday

I went out today and logged in tonight. Everything on my characters is fine (fow warrior+tormented str shield), but on my monk, i was moved to gtob(place to pass off the stuff obviously), my brand new tormented prot staff is gone (voltaic spear is still there), and a golden rin relic is in its place? Also the inventory has been rummaged around and moved around. Finally, 100k+35ectos are gone out of my storage

Needless to say I'm pissed. Never gave my pass out, etc, but it's very odd that not everything is gone?

Changed my pass etc, but wtf, i feel violated, and now i am basically broke.

I will give you a two thumbs up mate, I like your attitude about this, you just lost shit, but your looking at the posative way.

I had my account hacked, never retreved it, but thats a long time ago.

I don't know how I got hacked, I just assume I was on a site like this and maybe got a keylogger.


change your password asap if you haven't alredy. and I would advise each month you continue changing it. and make it something random

check your virus scanning as much as you can, and you should be fine.


Do answer yes I do think there could be hackers on guru or other forums, I other forums being hacked before * game amp if I remeber* and I got 20 trojans lol

I did not sure how ......but yeah

I swear to god...this jsut happened to me like 30 mins ago...

Logged in from a error7 after maybe 20 mins to find my main in temple of balth...not toa where i left her. Missing 330 ectos.... q9 VS....2 zkeys....100ishk....everlasting autotonic.... and a grail of might was in my invo...

I put a thingy in in the accnt support but is that the right place? I havent traded with anyone at all all day so can that be tracked? Any ideas here?

The only thing that i think could have keylogged me is textmod but im 2/3 continents and ive had it for a long time now. And yes i closed it and changed my pw

awww geez i haven't gotten on GW in awhile and now I am worried about my chars. Gotta check on that

this is kind of strange where have you guys visited in like the last few days (websites) maybe if you all you guys have visited the same ones we could narrow it down to a site that is grabbing your pass?

so today i went on gw and realized my main was in great temple of balthazar. cuz last time i remembered i was in kaineg helping my friend... i get on my main and see all my weapons, ectos (60), and my zkeys (100) all gone. all replaced with some stupid quest items and red iris flowers...

like wtf... im pretty sure i dont give my info to somebody else and idk what to do anymore. i changed my pw after that. anyone know whats happening? other than the fact my account got hacked into?


EDIT:
i just saw the other persons thread on getting hacked... same person?>

Happen to download any suspicious programs lately?

I've not downloaded anything suspicious, I am not mentally damaged and clearly there is a trend here. What is happening? Oh Gods, is the sky falling?

edit=finished virus scan, nothing detected

I've been out of state for a couple days, just came back late saturday. Played a little saturday, played a little today, then that happened. Nobody uses my computer when I'm gone either, unless my cats figured out how to turn it on and log into gw without me. Also I'm the only one in my house that plays gw. Now I'm afraid to log out of gw cause the hacker might come back

Edit to say - holy cow I just got that spam message on guru to buy gold and crap, I deleted it as fast as possible. How the heck could I have been hacked first before I even received the message?

Something is definitely up, I haven't seen this many hacks of people who aren't prone to click special links/etc in awhile. I wonder if it has anything to do with the spam PM myself and a few others received. Didn't click the link, just replied with hate

Yikes. Need to change my password ASAP.

O__o

Esp with all the recent err7 I've seen everywhere.

You can blame the fact that I've never felt insecure about my security of anything I've done on the internet for this little predicament that's been cooked up.

Logged in tonight, thinking I would check and see if Shayne hit his birthday and got his gift. Opened up my inventory, and I saw something strange. I usually keep an ID kit and Salvage kit as my first two items, but for some reason, there was a Grail of Might and 4 Armors of Salvation instead. I checked my Xunlai account. All of my money was gone. In fact, all the money on Shayne was gone. My undedicated Greased was also gone, and after looking at the situation more, I realized I was out ~192 Z-keys. Switching through my characters, nothing else seems to be out of place. Whatever unintentional changes that happened to my account occured between Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, tonight.

Not really too miffed by this, as I still had my dedicated Greased from two years back, I decided that my account really wasn't secure any more. I needed to change my password. However, to do that, I felt I was going to have to go through PlayNC, who has been less than friendly to deal with in the past. Here's where my predicament lies:

- My account name for GW is to an e-mail that I never use. Upon attempting to access it tonight for the first time in two or so years, I couldn't produce the right password.
- I can't remember what my account name is for PlayNC, much less what the password is. I could have a pretty good guess at the password, but I'm sure that if I changed my account e-mail's password in the past, I may have changed my PlayNC password at some point.
- I can't do a "Forgot my password" maneuver, because I can't correctly answer the questions to what I believe may be my PlayNC account name.

At this point, the only thing that I feel can tie me to owning my account is the fact that I've been using it for the past two and a half years, although that alone now looks pretty weak. I'm confused now on what action I should take, what action I possibly can take, and how I can get my password changed for my Guild Wars account.

That the gold ad PM? Got that too, just laughed
_____
Edit:Ah no, just checked it,that wasn't anything having to do with GW, just other video games. No link either.

*shrug*

I'm not sure why so many people are getting hit by this. They need your login (email) and your password to get into your acct don't they, or are other countries different that the US? Login is the email address you registered with, password you choose.

Changing your password is a good start, but unless you're going to use a completely random mix of numbers, letters & symbols, you could still be brute forced because they still know your login name. You can and should change that at PlayNC as well. There are many free webmail accounts you can open, I would suggest gmail since you can do aliases and still have your mail go to the same inbox.

P.S. Yes a random pw can still be brute forced, but if you use a minimum of 8 characters and a random mix of numbers, letters and symbols, unless the govt is after you, it would take a single pc months if not years to hack it.

My advice is to change your email and password. The first rule, never ever click on any links given to you or do anything that seems out of place. Not saying that you guys done that to get hacked but it's a general guideline to prevent being hacked.

To whoever asked, yes, I received a spam pm regarding buying ecto and zkeys for real money. Deleted it asap.

If I would have realized what the people were talking about in this thread, I probably wouldn't have started my own one in Q&A.

I'm facing a similar issue of losing a lot of stuff, and it has also happened to me just these past couple days. I've done nothing out of the ordinary that would warrant an opening for a hacking.

Omg, I almost got shocked from reading this.

Ok, so I read this, and went to my characters just to make sure they are ok. Then when I clicked on one of the characters, it was in GtoB, and I literally said to myself "O god, I got hit" but turned out all the stuff is there, my zealous scythe seemed to have moved all on its own(0.o?) but everything is all there.

But yeah....running a virus scan right now.

You can get accounts back with your serial number if you know it I believe.. not sure what to say though but I have heard of something being done through this way. I'd suggest writing down all your passwords and logins on a USB drive and then encrypt an archive with them inside.

have any of you bought gold online or items?

like..registering with your email on some gold site..?

my friend got his account hacked...and said that the last thing he did was buying zkeys from a site..and guess what is more strange..is that the trader asked him any mini pets so the trade would look "normal". he didn't loose much other than the keys he bought..since he's fairly new and only has a lvl 20 character. He said that he logged in and his character was in Great temple...this looks fishy as heck. But that would teach him, i told him to stop since he would get banned eventually..he changed his pass and email too.

Antivirus will NOT be able to detect anything brand new or anything that its creators failed to notice. Custom, specifically targeted malware rarely gets discovered and analyzed.

Don't trust AV with your security. Ever. It won't save your ass when it matters.

Then what will? Being a huge brain and knowing what every file does? It's not perfect but it's not "ever".

What he meant is that if the virus is a new kind of virus, the AV wouldn't necessarily recognize it as being malicious since its creators usually are intellegent enough to make sure the virus won't be delected easily by normal AV. Remember downadup? Got the FBI into the mess, that's how bad some virus can be.

But if its just a normal trojan you AV should delect it.

You lost me. I've got boxes for two of the campaigns, so producing keys/serials for those should be no trouble. The encryption of passwords and such sound like something I'll have to look up how to do.

That is exactly what happened to my husband's character a few months ago. Nothing deleted, no customised items taken, just tormented/everlasting tonics with a bizarre axe in it's place.
He is an extremely paranoid network admin guy and runs a firewall box, scans everything, knows not to download anything.
*shrug* Anet do not ever say anything about it, so it looks like this will continue to be an ongoing problem.

If you can't access your old plaync account or the email address you used for it, then make a new account, go to the support section and tell them that. Since it looks like you were hacked (were you? You didn't actually lose very much, and hackers tend to strip accounts. Maybe a roommate? Annoying little brother? )

Anyway. Make a new plaync account, go to the support area, to the "Ask A Question" part. Not the easiest to find, but shouldn't be very hard. Tell them about your predicament, with as many details as you can. Make sure to mention that you don't have access to your old email address, or to your old plaync account, and wish to get your plaync account back. Off to show them the serials you used (NOT on the public support site, but they email you, and you can send stuff through there.)

You'll get some random "Hello Name, I've sent your question to somebody who is in charge of stuff like that" email, then you have to wait.

You'll be asked for some stuff like the street address you first used for the plaync account, the name you used, maybe the last four numbers of the credit card you used for purchases through plaync.

If you can prove to them that you are actually you, they will change the email address of your old plaync account to the one you use now (or another you provide), and email a "Password Reset Form" to you. Once inside your plaync account, you can change your password for both it and GW.

And after a couple of days you get a "plaync support survey" about how satisified you are with the help you got ^_^

Just don't go all rant-y and start cursing them out. Far too many people do that and they just don't bother to help you if that's the case, since most "hacking" incidents are the fault of the user.

Hope all that helped. I had a similar problem (thought I actually lost quite a lot of stuff), and I got my account back

Edit: For the encrypted archive thing... just use Winrar or 7Zip to create the archive, and in the process, there's a small "Make password" checkbox or something like that. Use that. Or, if you trust your family/friends, write them down and keep the paper in a book that never leaves your room.

I got what he meant but how he said it was over top. Reminded me of propaganda

Don't trust AV with your security. Ever. It won't save your ass when it matters.

I would assume that the "bizarre axe", quest items, red irises etc., are all there to make a valid trade - the hackers/thieves believing that they are safer not making a one-sided trade when they loot your account.

A worrying trend.

yes, that's what I was referring to an archive (RAR/ZIP/7z/etc) that has some password in place before opening it. WinRAR costs a little bit but 7z is free.. it should be a similar program though. I know there is a "hide all files" style option too.. that way unless you put the password in you can't even see what's inside, could be anything.

Ok, something is going on.

Something is going on, my PvE warrior was at temple. I have 5 z-keys but that is it. I had a Armor of Salvation in my inventory. Thank god I had a money dump and was broke.

Who is this mysterious person who has a fetish for zkeys !? Must be someone who is high zaishen ranked ! (i feel safe being banned, gl to him getting onto my acount. You guys got owned.)

if your are able to log into your account u don't need to worry about a plaync account anymore u can change your pw by changing your account at the bottom they did away with needing the plaync as a lot forgot their pw and so on and not being able to access the emails

1- I'm not sure about this but if the game doesn't lock the acount after several failed attempts at accessing it then gw isn't safe enough from brute force attacks. what I'm saying is that the game should lock the acount say after you try 3 times to enter a wrong password (never tried it so not sure, maybe the game already does this)

2- another thing is that some people register on sites to buy virtual money. if you used the same email to register as the one you use in your game account then you gave them a chance to brute force your account (thats if the game doesn't have a safe mechanism like what I described in point 1). Now if you used the same password also then you can't blame them for hacking you .. although I doubt anyone would do such a stupid thing.

3- clicking on a link that someone offered you might make your pc download a keylogger that can steel your username and password. I'm not an expert in security but some times even visiting such sites might make your pc download a keylogger (depends on the latests exploits for windows ans IE).

I don't want to sound like I'm an expert or something but seriously I don't see how an account can get hacked if you don't give your details to anyone and you also don't visit such sites that offer virtual currency.

In any case, I hope this doesn't become an epidemic that makes people leave gw cos if that happened to me then I'm sure I'll stop playing gw.

I seriously hope anet can get to the root of this thing since its not just a simple case of a 1 guy got hacked. Goodluck guys and I realy feel bad for you guys

to OP, you are very lucky to not have ur main deleted

last month i was hacked. i had 2 characters deleted so i emailed ncsoft (waste of time). later that day i was playing, just running around town then i get err7. by the time i log back on all my characters were deleted.

the only weird thing is nothing at all was missing just all my characters gone. had 1700 ectos at the time but i dont know why they didnt take that..
im more pissed about my main being deleted with 26 maxed titles

guys, this stuff is scary, I hope Anet finds out soon what is happening.